Monday, January 16, 2017

Safe, efficient, reliable ... and boring

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, January 11.)

I walked past a big 1970s-era
Chrysler Valiant in town the other day – an orange one (still the original
paint job, I’d guess) with a tan vinyl roof.

I’ve driven such cars. They
handled like a wheelbarrow half-filled with water. But I’ll tell you what: they
had character. They had personality. When you drove a Chrysler Valiant, you
knew you were driving a Chrysler Valiant.

I contrast this with the
occasions when I hire a modern rental car. I couldn’t tell you what I’m driving
without looking at the logo in the centre of the steering wheel.

They all feel and look the
same. They’re safe, well-equipped, economical, reliable … and boring.

I thought of that Chrysler
Valiant a couple of days later when I was reading the motoring section of my
paper. It included a story about the new Holden Commodore due to be released
next year – the first
Commodore not to be built in Australia.

Holden had released advanced
publicity shots of the new model from different angles. To me it looked
virtually indistinguishable from the equivalent model Mazda, Hyundai or Kia.

Say what you like about the
Chrysler Valiant, but it was unmistakeably a Chrysler Valiant. There was no way
you’d mistake it for its competitors, the Ford Falcon and the Holden Kingswood
(each of which, in turn, looked completely different from the other).

And before you say anything,
yes, I know your chance of getting killed was far greater if you crashed in a
1975 Valiant or Holden Kingswood than if you have a prang in a modern Honda or
Subaru.

In that respect, I concede
we’ve made enormous advances. But did safety improvements have to come at the
expense of the styling quirks that gave the cars of earlier eras their
individuality?

Allow me to illustrate my
point. On Facebook recently, my friend Phil O'Brien, co-host of Radio New Zealand's popular Matinee Idle, posted a 1957 magazine advertisement for
a car identical to the first one he owned – an eggshell-blue Austin A50
Cambridge.

Phil invited other people to
contribute reminiscences about their own first cars. There were 113 responses,
many of them very witty.

They covered a weird and
wonderful assortment of makes and models that people of a certain age would
remember well, from the everyday (Austin A30s, Vanguards, Vauxhall Veloxes,
Triumph Heralds, Holden Specials, Morris Minors and Ford Prefects) to the
slightly more exotic and racy (a Renault 750, a Jowett Javelin and an Auto
Union – precursor of the Audi).

There were some that few
people with any self-esteem would admit to having owned (namely, a 1970s Morris
Marina and a Skoda Octavia wagon from the 1960s). But the point was that for a
couple of days, people indulged in an entertaining nostalgia-fest about old
cars.

Now ask yourself: can you
imagine anyone getting similarly excited in 50 years’ time about peas-in-a-pod
Ford, Mazdas and Toyotas? I can’t.

Good cars, all of them, but
dull. With globalisation, the “world car” that motor companies started talking about
in the 1970s became a reality. Lookalike models roll off assembly lines on
every continent.

Old cars were quirky. That’s
why people gather wherever classic or vintage cars are on display. Small wonder
that Nelson publishers Potton and Burton recently brought out We Had One of Those!, a wallow in automotive
nostalgia written by Stephen Barnett.

Would any relentlessly profit-driven
car multinational today allow its engineers and designers to create something
as eccentric as the lowlight Morris Minor, the Morgan three-wheeler or the
Hillman Imp? It just wouldn’t happen.

And here’s another thing
about modern car design. In some ways it has regressed, in both practical and
aesthetic terms.

Design orthodoxy demands a
rising waistline and a passenger compartment that tapers sharply towards the rear.
As a result, window space is greatly reduced for back-seat passengers and the
rear view is so restricted that drivers become almost wholly dependent on the
reversing camera to see what’s going on behind them. And they call this
progress?

Few cars demonstrate the
regression better than the royal family’s vehicle of choice, the Range Rover.

Like its humble older sibling
the Land Rover, the Range Rover was revolutionary when it was launched in 1970.
It was the world’s first luxury four-wheel-drive and a masterpiece of design.

It had clean, simple lines. The
driver sat high, surrounded by acres of glass. Reliability may have occasionally
been an issue, but visibility certainly wasn’t.

Now look at one of its
descendants, the Range Rover Evoque. It looks as if something very large has
sat on it. It has a squashed look, with a rear window that resembles one of
those narrow slits that soldiers shove their rifles through.

The big-selling Toyota Corolla,
too, has morphed into something that resembles a particularly nasty insect.
It’s not even quirky-ugly in the way that, say, the 1970s Leyland P76 was.

Now there was a car that was
so ugly it was strangely desirable. They don’t make ’em like that anymore, and
more’s the pity.

3 comments:

One car that deserves a mention as being a favourite of the young was a Volkswagen Beetle. It was cheap to buy and cheap to run, and had a wonderful big relative, the Kombi. These were the vehicles of the surfers, the freaks, the students.

For me a Chrysler Valiant had the image of sheer class. I remember when my doctor uncle bought one-- he must have had "overseas funds"-- and the extended family spent ages standing around admiring it.

A Triumph 2000 was the car of the boring middle class. I bought one once when we had kids, and it kept breaking down. I took it into the mechanic who looked up at me and asked: "Have you bled the slave cylinder?" (That is a question to ask anybody if you want to silence anybody about anything.)

Enjoy driving now because within a decade or two driver-controlled cars will be banned on the open road, and we will wonder how we tolerated individuals hurtling towards each other in tin cans, killing a sizeable proportion of us.

My first car, bought in Melbourne, was a 1966 Valiant Regal - a slightly up-market version of the standard Valiant. It had obviously been previously owned by a hoon because it had wide wheels at the rear, which suited me fine. But sheer class? I don't think so.Like you, I later made the mistake of owning a Triumph 2000 - the most troublesome vehicle I ever had. I once pulled on the handbrake and the whole thing ripped out of its mounting. I could look down and see the road underneath.Your mention of the VW Beetle reminds me of the time I went hunting with a friend who owned an old VW with a 6-volt electrical system. On the return journey along a dark and winding country road, the headlights were so faint that I leaned out the passenger-side window with a torch to illuminate the way ahead.

Great story about the Beetle. I believe it. The 6V electrical system made it atrocious when I bought my second one and lived in Christchurch. The car wouldn't start in the cold, so I had to make sure I parked it on a hill.

The Valiant was class when it first came out (about 1962?) but from what you say it obviously didn't take long for the bogans in Australia to get hold of it and move it down the social pecking order.

IN NZ it might have been different because most people in those years seemed to have second hand cars because they had no overseas funds. Dad and Mum had a Vauxhall Wyvern.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.